For anyone estimating Defence construction work. The contract already tells you who carries each risk, and most of it is in places people do not read. Site information. Defence provides it, but it does not form part of the contract and carries no guarantee as to accuracy or adequacy. You also warrant you did not rely on those things, and there is a bar on claims arising out of that information. Treat it as a starting point for your own investigations. Latent conditions. The definition is narrow. Ground conditions at the site only, excluding inclement weather, and only where they differ materially from what a prudent, competent and experienced contractor should have anticipated. Notice must be immediate and in writing, and extra costs are only recoverable from after the notice is given. Worth noting there is a separate optional special condition covering hazardous substances and asbestos, which is broader, but it only applies if it was included in your contract. Site access. If Defence fails to hand over the site on time at the start, the contract says that is not a breach. Your entitlement is extra costs and an extension of time. Delay damages are a separate thing, they apply only to a breach by the Commonwealth, and they are capped at a daily amount in the Contract Particulars. Worth noting that a later interruption to access is a different question and can be a breach. Security Alert System. A change in level can increase your price by your extra costs or decrease it by any savings. The baseline level is in the Contract Particulars. And the thread through the last three. Each is an entitlement subject to the notice rules in clause 12. Written notice within 21 days of the event, detailed claim within 21 days of that notice, updates every 28 days while it continues. Fail and the price is not adjusted and you are barred. Site information sits outside that, because the contract bars claims about it altogether. Two questions for the group. Which of these four has actually cost you money? And does anyone routinely check the delay damages cap in the Particulars before pricing?

This one matters for how you price and how you position, so it is worth twenty minutes. Australian dwelling construction productivity has fallen for seven consecutive years and now sits 21.5 per cent below where it was in 2013-14. That is the largest decline of any industry in the country over the decade. Three things in it that should change how you think about the next eighteen months: 1. Costs are not going back down on their own. The elevated pricing everyone is carrying is not just a materials story. It is a productivity story, and productivity problems do not unwind when freight rates normalise. 2. Treasury is proposing repeatable design certification. If a reference design can be certified once and reused, the economics of standardised delivery change materially. Anyone running volume or repeat product should be reading that closely. 3. Building Ministers have paused residential NCC changes until mid-2029. That is the first stable regulatory horizon in years, and it is long enough to justify investing in process rather than absorbing change. Read it, then tell me in the comments where you think the productivity gap actually shows up on your jobs. My guess is it is in approvals and rework rather than on the tools, but I would rather hear it from people running the sites. Link for the deep dive

On 14 August 2026, the Fair Trading and Building Amendment Act 2026 received assent (in force from 20 August). It sets up Decennial Liability Insurance (DLI), which will let apartment owners claim for serious building defects for up to 10 years after the building is occupied. A few things worth knowing before this comes up in your own client or project conversations: → It's a legal framework only right now. No insurer has been approved to actually sell DLI in NSW yet. → DLI is an alternative to the existing 2-year strata bond, not a new layer on top of it. Only one is needed for an occupation certificate. → The defect test has also broadened, from “serious defect” to “relevant defect,” which is a wider net. → Careful with terminology: “LDI” was a specific, now-closed product from one insurer that was never legally the same as decennial insurance. The right term going forward is DLI. Victoria is running a parallel reform too, so this looks like the start of a national shift rather than a one-off. Keen to hear how this lands for anyone advising developers or strata owners right now. Source: NSW Government, Building Commission NSW - Fair Trading and Building Amendment Act 2026.

If you've started looking into Defence tendering, you've probably heard ASDEFCON mentioned like it's one document. It's actually four separate templates, Strategic Materiel, Complex Materiel, Support, and Services, and each one governs a different kind of work with different requirements. Edition 09 walks through what each one actually covers and how to work out which applies to you before you start drafting a response. Curious whether anyone here has already run into the wrong-template problem firsthand, worth comparing notes if so. Full edition: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/asdefcon-rulebook-every-defence-bidder-signs-without-dh1bc